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Wonders Of The Universe (2011)

by Brian Cox(Favorite Author)

4.37 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0007395825 (ISBN13: 9780007395828)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Harper

review 1: Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 103-4 | Added on Monday, December 02, 2013, 02:21 PMOn Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 passed into the darkness behind the Moon, and Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders became the first humans in history to lose sight of Earth.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 126-27 | Added on Monday, December 02, 2013, 02:25 PMThe cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in. —G.K. Chesterton==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 201-2 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:40 PMGalaxies such as the spiral-shaped Dwingeloo 1 have recently been found hidden behind the Milky Way. This discovery supports what we already know: that there are many more won... moreders out there in the Universe that we have yet to discover.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 213-16 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:43 PMThe spectacular remains and towering pillars of Karnak Temple are a testament to the Egyptian belief in the power and importance of the Amun-Re, the Sun God, in their daily life, and of the Sun itself. Karnak Temple, home of Amun-Re, universal god, stands facing the Valley of the Kings across the Nile in the city of Luxor.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 225-27 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:44 PMEgyptian religious mythology is rich and complex. With almost 1,500 known deities, countless temples and tombs and a detailed surviving literature, the mythology of the great civilisation of the Nile is considered the most sophisticated religious system ever devised.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 236-39 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:45 PMThe original mound of earth is the god Tatenen, meaning ‘risen land’ (he also represented the fertile land that emerged from the Nile floods), while the lotus flower is the god Nefertem, the god of perfumes. Most important is the Sun God, born of the lotus blossom, who took on many forms but remained central to Egyptian religious thought for over 3,000 years. It was the Sun God who brought light to the cosmos, and with light came all of creation.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 249-50 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:45 PMIn the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Amun is referred to as the ‘eldest of the gods of the eastern sky’, symbolising his emergence as the solar deity at sunrise.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 256-59 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:46 PMThe Great Hypostyle Hall, the dominant feature of the temple, is aligned such that on 21 December, the winter solstice and shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere, the disc of the Sun rises between the great pillars and floods the space with light, which comes from a position directly over a small building inside which Amun-Re himself was thought to reside.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 271-72 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:46 PMa temple the size of Karnak will always be aligned with something in the sky, simply because it has buildings that point in all directions!==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 277-79 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:47 PMIt seems clear therefore that the columns are positioned and decorated to mark the compass directions around the temple, which is persuasive evidence that the heart of this building is aligned to capture the light from an important celestial event – the rising of the Sun in midwinter.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 312-13 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:51 PMThis is because we now think that around 95 per cent of the mass of galaxies such as our own Milky Way is made up of dark matter.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 323 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:51 PMGeoffrey Chaucer: ‘See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë, Which men clepeth the Milky Wey, For hit is whyt.’==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 325-27 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:52 PMM87, also known as Virgo A and Messier 87, is a giant elliptical galaxy located 54 million light years away from Earth in the Virgo Cluster. In this image the central jet is visible, which is a powerful beam of hot gas produced by a massive black hole in the core of the galaxy.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 331-33 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:52 PMTaken in December 2010, this is the most detailed picture of the Andromeda Galaxy, or M31, taken so far. It is our largest and closest spiral galaxy, and in this picture we can clearly see rings of new star formations developing.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 337-39 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:53 PMZwicky 18 was once thought to be the youngest galaxy, as its bright stars suggested it was only 500 million years old. However, recent Hubble Space Telescope images have identified older stars within it, making the galaxy as old as others but with new star formations.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 340-42 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:55 PMOur galaxy, the Milky Way, contains somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars, depending on the number of faint dwarf stars that are difficult for us to detect. The majority of stars lie in a disc around 100,000 light years in diameter and, on average, around 1,000 light years thick.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 346-49 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:56 PMAt the centre of our galaxy, and possibly every galaxy in the Universe, there is believed to be a super-massive black hole. Astronomers believe this because of precise measurements of the orbit of a star known as S2. This star orbits around the intense source of radio waves known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced ‘Sagittarius A-star’) that sits at the galactic centre. S2’s orbital period is just over fifteen years, which makes it the fastest-known orbiting object, reaching speeds of up to 2 per cent of the speed of light.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 353-54 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:57 PMThe only known way of cramming 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun into a space less than 17 light hours across is as a black hole, which is why astronomers are so confident that a giant black hole sits at the centre of the Milky Way.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 359-60 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:57 PMThe Quintuplet Cluster contains one of the most luminous stars in our galaxy, the Pistol Star, which is thought to be near the end of its life and on the verge of becoming a supernova==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 372-74 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:58 PMIn 2007, scientists using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile were able to observe a star in the Galactic Halo that is thought to be the oldest object in the Milky Way. HE 1523-0901 is a star in the last stages of its life; known as a red giant, it is a vast structure far bigger than our sun, but much cooler at its surface. HE 1523-0901 is==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 377-79 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 12:59 PMThis is why the detection of five radioactive elements in the light from HE 1523-0901 was so important. This dying star turns out to be 13.2 billion years old – that’s almost as old==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 384-86 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:02 PMUntil very recently, it was thought that our galaxy contained only four spiral arms – Perseus, Norma, Scutum–Centaurus and Carina–Sagittarius, with our sun in an off shoot of the latter called the Orion spur – but there is now thought to be an additional arm, called the Outer arm, an extension to the Norma arm.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 387-88 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:06 PMThe Sun was once thought to be an average star, but we now know that it shines brighter than 95 per cent of all other stars in the Milky Way.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 389-90 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:06 PMEvery second, the Sun burns 600 million tonnes of hydrogen in its core, producing 596 million tonnes of helium in the fusion reaction.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 390 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:06 PMThe missing four million tonnes of mass emerges as energy, which slowly travels to the Sun’s photosphere,==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 389-91 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:07 PMEvery second, the Sun burns 600 million tonnes of hydrogen in its core, producing 596 million tonnes of helium in the fusion reaction. The missing four million tonnes of mass emerges as energy, which slowly travels to the Sun’s photosphere, where it is released into the galaxy and across the Universe as light.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 400-401 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:07 PMThe Lagoon Nebula is one such star nursery; within this giant interstellar cloud of gas and dust, new stars are created.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 405-6 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:08 PMHerschel 36. This star is thought to be a ‘ZAMS’ star (zero ago main sequence) because it has just begun to produce the dominant part of its energy from hydrogen fusion in its core.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 408-10 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:08 PMEta Carinae is a pair of billowing gas and dust clouds that are the remnants of a stellar explosion from an unstable star system. The system consists of at least two giant stars, and shines with a brightness four million times that of our sun. One of these stars is thought to be a Wolf-Rayet star.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 412 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:08 PMIn 1843, Eta Carinae became one of the brightest stars in the Universe when it exploded.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 441-42 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:13 PMor ‘corpuscles’, as he called them in his Hypothesis of Light, published in 1675.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 444-45 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:13 PMLeonhard Euler, who felt that the phenomena of diffraction could only be explained by a wave theory.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 445-46 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:13 PMIn 1801, the English doctor Thomas Young appeared to settle the matter once and for all when he reported the results from his famous double-slit experiment, which clearly showed that light diffracted, and therefore must travel in the form of a wave.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 465-67 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:16 PMMichael Faraday was busy doing what scientists do best – playing around with wire and magnets. He discovered that if you push a magnet through a coil of wire, an electric current flows through the wire while the magnet is moving.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 470-72 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:17 PMAmpère discovered that two parallel wires carrying electric currents experience a force between them; this force is still used today to define the ampere, or amp – the unit of electric current. A single amp is defined as the current that must flow along two parallel wires of infinite length and negligible diameter to produce an attractive force of 0.0000007 Newtons between them.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 476-78 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:17 PMMaxwell, who, in a series of papers in 1861 and 1862, developed a single theory of electricity and magnetism that was able to explain all of the experimental work of Faraday, Ampère and others. But Maxwell’s crowning glory came in 1864, when he published a paper that is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements in the history of science.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 481-82 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:18 PMElectricity and magnetism can be unified by introducing two new concepts: electric and magnetic fields. The idea of a field is central to modern physics;==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 494-97 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:19 PMWhere c is the speed of light and the quantities μ0 and ε0 are related to the strengths of electric and magnetic fields. The fact that the velocity of light can be measured experimentally on a bench top with wires and magnets was the key piece of evidence that light is an electromagnetic wave. ==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 507-10 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:26 PMMaxwell’s equations also predict exactly how fast these waves must fly away from the electric charges that create them. The speed of the waves is the ratio of the strengths of the electric and magnetic fields – quantities that had been measured by Faraday, Ampère and others and were well known to Maxwell. When Maxwell did the sums, he must have fallen off his chair. He found that his equations predicted that the waves in the electric and magnetic fields travelled at the speed of light!==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 513 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:26 PMIn modern language, we would say that light is an electromagnetic wave.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 515 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:26 PMit had first been measured by Ole Romer in 1676.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 521-24 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:29 PMEmpedocles and Galileo, separated by almost two millennia, felt that light must travel at a finite, if extremely high, velocity. Empedocles’s reasoning was elegant, pre-dating Aristotle by a century. He considered light travelling across the vast distance from the Sun to Earth, and noted that everything that travels must move from one point to another.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 527-30 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:29 PMGalileo set out to measure the speed of light using two lamps. He held one and sent an assistant a large distance away with another. When they were in position, Galileo opened a shutter on his lamp, letting the light out. When his assistant saw the flash, he opened his shutter, and Galileo attempted to note down the time delay between the opening of his shutter and his observation of the flash from his assistant’s lamp. His conclusion was that light must travel extremely rapidly, because he was unable to determine its speed.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 548-50 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:31 PMThe point at which the Sun crosses the Meridian is also the point at which it reaches its highest position in the sky on any given day as it journeys from sunrise in the east to sunset in the west. We call this time noon, or midday.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 551-53 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:31 PMto determine your longitude, set a clock to read 12 o’clock when the Sun reaches the highest point in the sky at Greenwich. If it reads 2pm when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky where you are, you are thirty degrees to the west of Greenwich.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 560-61 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:36 PMGalileo, having discovered the moons of Jupiter, was convinced he could use the orbits of these moons as a clock,==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 573-74 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:37 PM1671, Romer and Picard observed over one hundred of Io’s eclipses, noting the times and intervals between each.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 579-81 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:38 PMThese sketches (published in Istoria e Dimonstrazione in 1613) show the changing position of the moons of Jupiter over 12 days. Jupiter is represented by the large circle, with the four moons as dots on either side.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 589-91 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:38 PMRomer’s genius was to realise that this pattern implied there was nothing wrong with the clockwork of Jupiter and Io, because the error depended on the distance between Earth and Jupiter and had nothing to do with Io itself.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 594-95 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:40 PMFactor in the time it takes light to travel between Jupiter and Earth and the theory works. Romer did this by trial and error, and was able to correctly account for the shifting times of the observed eclipses.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 598-99 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:41 PMHe simply stated that it takes light twenty-two minutes to cross the diameter of Earth’s orbit.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 600-601 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:41 PMIn his ‘Treatise sur la lumière’ (1678), Huygens quotes a speed in strange units as 110 million toises per second. Since a toise is two metres (seven feet), this gives a speed of 220,000,000 metres per second, which is not far off the modern value of 299,792,458==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 631-32 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:43 PMthe sound barrier was not breached until 14 October 1947, when Chuck Yeager became the first human to pilot a supersonic flight. Flying in the Bell–XS1,==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 663-64 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 01:59 PMIn Einstein’s theory, anything that has no mass is compelled to travel at the special speed through space. Conversely, anything that has mass is compelled to travel slower than this speed.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 694-96 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 02:02 PMAt the very edge of the Solar System, the round-trip travel time for radio signals sent and received by Voyager 1 on its journey into interstellar space is currently thirty-one hours, fifty-two minutes and twenty-two seconds, as of September 2010.==========Wonders of the Universe (Brian Cox)- Highlight Loc. 702-4 | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 02:05 PMGreat Rift Valley was such a place. We arrived in Tanzania on 10 May 2010 for the first day of filming. After a brief overnight stay close to the airport at Kilimanjaro, we were driven out into the Serengeti
review 2: This is an excellent book that explains complex areas of science in a coherent way. One of my frustrations with Brian Cox's TV works is he speaks in a such a slow way that it doesn't cover as much ground an hour could. This could be down to the BBC assuming that people can't take in information as fast as students in a physics lecture would be expected to but at least with the book you can read as fast or slow as you mind and level of knowledge allows. After many people bought and few people read Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time there was a danger that the broader public had been put off physics books. This book and some others in recent years has changed all that (along with Brian Cow TV shows). This is a remarkable achievement since physics has got so mind-bending now that graduate students today are having to do mental gymnastics way beyond that of their counterparts from 50 years ago. It is great that Cox can find time to do such books and TV shows and I am sure that his influence will encourage new generations of physicists to make sense of problems that are currently beyond anyone's grasp. less

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